Nvidia Ion

[yosh64]

hey

NVIDIA Ion Platform Energizes Atom Into A Premium PC Experience

I thought some might be interested in this, makes me think of the Pandora II, hehe.

cyas

 

[(naw)mcx]

Haha, looks like good stuff!

I bet it has a five minute battery life, mind you!

 

[yosh64]

hey

Yep, I wonder about the battery life also, although I think it was said that the gpu doesn't have much of an affect on the battery, and I wonder if the smaller form helps with battery? Anyhows I don't have much of a clue, hehe.

I just ran into a nice gallery of the thing from the ubergizmo report.

cyas

 

[Squidge]

The typical configuration is to use an Intel Atom CPU, so its not appropriate for small devices such as the Pandora, or mobile phones/etc. It's more for Notebooks.

 

[yosh64]

hey

edit: Squidge, you realise that the board pictured is both the Atom and Ion together? so I think... so it's pretty small, and from what I read could possibly get smaller. Hmm, or do you mean it's not appropriate for other reasons, such as battery life? or software compatibility? which I think might be okay, but dunno.

Hmm, I would tend to agree that you might not see it in things such as mobile phones and more so in notebooks, but you might start seeing more handheld computers, but I dunno if you would find any with gaming controls such as the pandora.

Also about battery life...

NVIDIA's Ion Platform: Bringing High Def to Netbooks - Introducing NVIDIA’s Ion Platform (page 2)
QUOTE

NVIDIA claims that a netbook running with the Ion platform should have the same battery life as one running on the conventional Atom + 945G setup.



and, Nvidia Q+A: Ion Platform Will Unlock the Power of the Netbook
QUOTE

You didn’t mention battery life. Will your platform impact battery life?
It will have a very similar battery performance to Intel’s current platform which uses the Atom processor and Intel 945 integrated graphics solution. The 9400M chip has very good power usage dynamics.



cyas

 

[mali]

But that is what Squidge meant. The Atom causes bad battery life, no matter what GPU is used.
Edit:

 

[yosh64]

hey

Ahh, makes sense now.

mali, one question about that graph, is that the Atom and Cortex-A8 by themself, or does it include other hardware? edit: as maybe the Atom is just paired with hardware that drains more power, just a thought.

edit
But yea, that is a massive difference, do you have a link to the original article this graph came from so I can look further into things?

another edit
With that much difference, I think it would be cool to see actual Notebooks using the ARM Cortex-Ax and such.

cyas

 

[mali]

Well, looking at the graph's title it seems, that they measured only the power draw of the CPU without other components.

I found the graph on this blog:
http://blogs.computerworld.com/apples_tabl...ex_architecture

Edit:
QUOTE
With that much difference, I think it would be cool to see actual Notebooks using the Cortex-A8 and such.

On handhelds like Pandora, the Cortex can show it's full potential, but on Net/Notebooks, the screen backlight and HDDs and such suck the most power, unfortunately. ARM is clearly handheld technology.

 

[yosh64]

hey

For anyone interested, I think I found the original source of the graphs refered to in that article.

See Mobile Computing PDF, seems the presentation or whatever might be sponsored by ARM, which might be cause for alarm, but I dunno.

cyas

 

[mali]

ARM wouldn't post wrong numbers, Intel could sue them

 

[Squirrel61]

I wouldn't consider this a possible Pandora competitor but still it's a great development. I'm thinking more along the lines of a super small but yet powerfull mediacentre. Or a netbook that's finally suited for gaming.